New Racials and Warlords of Draenor Dev Watercooler: Design Philosophy

Today the Blizzard devs explain some of the design philosophies behind changes in Warlords of Draenor, with additional information on Crowd Control and Diminishing Returns changes.

Some racials are getting changed--some that have hit and expertise boosts need to be changed as those stats won't exist, and others are simply too strong.

The item squish is coming because player power has really gotten out of control--Blizzard even made handy graphs showing it!

Abilities are getting removed in Warlords to reduce complexity and bloat--some are passives, others are class-wide abilities that really should be for one spec.

There is too much Crowd Control in the game. Many CC spells are getting removed, disarms are gone, and the number of Diminishing Returns categories are reduced.

After this blog was posted, which mostly covered old information, several Blizzard devs on twitter answered questions from players--revealing new information in the process. We liveblogged the highlights and organized them here because Twitter is pretty messy for this sort of information!

New Racial Information

Technical Game Designer Celestalon also answered more specifics about new racials on his Twitter, such as "Weapon Specialization racials are removed because Hit/Exp are removed." Source:

Dwarf: Lost and Might of the Mountain. Gained Might of the Mountain, a passive which adds 2% Crit Damage. Also... A change to Stoneform: Also removes Magic/Curse. HOWEVER, it still cannot be used while CC'd. (It is still NOT a CC-break) Source

Night Elves: Quickness also increases movement speed by 2% passively. They also got a new passive which is quite unique... (Remember, no more haste breakpoints!) Touch of Elune, a new passive which grants 1% Haste at night, 1% Crit during the day. SourceShadowmeld is unchanged. Source

Abilities and Itemization

Celestalon and Holinka also answered questions on the ability bloat and general ability changes:

Q: Regarding removing CDs, which is likely gonna be cut for Ferals Berserk or Tiger Fury or both? A: Both of those are staying. Tiger's Fury is on the border between feeling like a DPS cooldown and a rotational button. Source

Q: I understand if this is too specific. Re pet-cast CC: Freeze going away? If so, room for a non-CC replacement? A: Water Elemental Freeze is staying. However, there is a minor talent that teaches Squirt a new spell that shares a cooldown with it Source

Blizzard

Development on World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor is progressing well, and we'll soon be ready to enter the first phases of public testing. To help prep you for battle, let’s break down some of the upcoming changes we’re making to stats, abilities, and crowd control for the expansion.

Stat Squish

Character progression is one of the hallmarks of any role-playing game, and naturally that means we're always adding more power for players to acquire. After multiple expansions and content updates, we've reached a point where the numbers for health, damage, and other stats are so big they’re no longer easy for players to grasp. What’s more, a lot of power granularity is tied up in tiers of older content, from Molten Core to Dragon Soul—and while it was once necessary for your character's power to spike up suddenly when you hit level 70, that’s not the case anymore.

In order to bring things down to a more understandable level, we'll be reducing the scale of stats throughout the game and smoothing out those obsolete spikes, so that power scales linearly through questing content from levels 1 to 85. This applies to creatures, spells, abilities, consumables, gear . . . everything. And while that means your numbers for stats and damage are being reduced by a huge amount, the same goes for creatures' health and damage output. For example, a Fireball that previously hit a creature for 450,000 out of his 3,000,000 health (15% of its health) may now hit that same creature for 30,000 out of its 200,000 health (still 15% of its health).

It's important to understand that this isn’t a nerf—in effect, you’ll still be just as powerful, but the numbers that you see will be easier to comprehend. This also won’t reduce your ability to solo old content. In fact, to provide some additional peace of mind, we're implementing further scaling of your power against lower-level targets so that earlier content will be even more accessible than it is now.

We’re also removing all base damage on player spells and abilities and adjusting attack power or spell power scaling as needed, making it so that all specializations will scale at the same rate.

Racial Traits

We want races to have fun and interesting perks, but if some of those traits are too powerful, players may feel compelled to play a specific race even if it’s not really the one they want to play. For example, Trolls' Berserking ability was extremely powerful, and their Beast Slaying passive was either completely irrelevant or tremendously powerful, based on the situation, compared to other racial traits. On the other end of the spectrum, many races had few or no performance-affecting perks. On top of that, a number of racials that currently grant Hit or Expertise will soon need replacing, since those stats are being removed in Warlords of Draenor.

To keep racials more in line with one another, we’ve decided to bring down the couple high outliers, then establish a fair baseline and bring everyone else up to that. We’re accomplishing this by improving old passives, replacing obsolete ones, and adding a few new ones where necessary. Ultimately, our goal is to achieve much better parity among races.

Ability Pruning

Over the years, we've added significantly more new spells and abilities than we've removed, and the game’s complexity has steadily increased. We’re to the point now where players are starting to get overwhelmed, sometimes feeling like they need dozens of keybinds (in a few extreme cases, over a hundred). While the game is loaded with niche abilities that could theoretically be useful in some rare scenario, in reality, many of these are barely used at all—and in some cases, the game would simply be better off without them.

For Warlords of Draenor, we decided that we needed to pare down the number of abilities available to each class and spec in order to remove some of that unnecessary complexity. That means restricting some abilities to certain specs that really need them instead of being class-wide, and outright removing some other abilities. It also includes removing some Spellbook clutter, such as passives that we can merged with other passives or base abilities.

This doesn’t mean that we want to reduce the depth of gameplay or dumb things down. We still want players to face interesting decisions during combat, and we still want skill to matter . . . but we can achieve that without the needless complexity in the game now, and we can remove some of the game’s more convoluted mechanics while maintaining depth and skill variety.

One type of ability that we focused on removing is temporary power buffs (aka "cooldowns"). Removing these also helps achieve one of our other goals, which is to reduce the amount of cooldown stacking in the game. In cases where a class or spec has multiple cooldowns that typically end up getting used together (often in a single macro), we merged them, or removed some of them entirely.

The process of determining which spells and abilities to cut or change is a very complex one—we know that every ability feels vital to someone, and we don't take this process lightly. Even if we ended up cutting your favorite ability, we hope you’ll understand why we did so in the context of our larger goals for the expansion. Ultimately, the point of these changes is to increase players' ability to understand the game, not to reduce gameplay depth.

Crowd Control and Diminishing Returns

One other big takeaway from Mists of Pandaria is that there is currently simply too much crowd control (CC) in the game, especially when it comes to PvP. To address that, we knew that we needed an across-the-board disarmament. Here's a summary of the player-cast CC changes:

Removed Silence effects from interrupts. Silence effects still exist, but are never attached to an interrupt.

Removed all Disarms.

Reduced the number of Diminishing Returns (DR) categories.

All Roots now share the same DR category.

Exception: Roots on Charge-type abilities have no DR category, but have a very short duration instead.

All Stuns now share the same DR category.

All Incapacitate (sometimes called "mesmerize") effects now share the same DR category and have been merged with the Horror DR category.

Removed the ability to make cast-time CC spells instant with a cooldown.

Removed many CC spells entirely, and increased the cooldowns and restrictions on others.

Pet-cast CC is more limited, and in many cases has been removed.

Cyclone can now be dispelled by immunities and Mass Dispel.

PvP trinkets now grant immunity to reapplication of an effect from the same spell cast when they break abilities with persistent effects, like Solar Beam.

Long fears are now shorter in PvP due to the added benefit of a fear changing the players position.

Additionally, we've significantly reduced the number of throughput-increasing cooldowns and procs in order to further reduce burst damage.

Whether your favorite class is losing an ability or taking a hit to its CC potential, we hope this discussion helped you better understand why we’re making these changes. It’s important to remember that other classes will be getting some of their CC removed too. We think this entire package will make exploring Azeroth and PvPing a more enjoyable experience for everyone, and we’re looking forward to having you try them out when we open up the expansion for testing.

In the next Dev Watercooler, we'll explore the changes coming to health and healing in Warlords of Draenor.

Comments

Comment by Meilao

Cool article, be interesting to see what cool downs we'll have left in WoD.

Comment by Interest

on 2014/02/28 00:07:43

I enjoyed this read. I can safely say I agree with a good chunk of what I read as well...particularly:

There is too much Crowd Control in the game. Many CC spells are getting removed, disarms are gone, and the number of Diminishing Returns categories are reduced.

Comment by Mitchpriest

on 2014/02/28 00:17:23

Talk about how racials are extremely powerfulMention Troll's berserking and even beast slayingSay nothing of the Human's free pvp trinket slot.Wat.

This would be considered OP if it wasn't on the same CD as every other movement freeing trinket in the game...

Comment by yukiusako

on 2014/02/28 00:19:21

Personally, I hope shamans get fewer abilities. I've played mainly Druid, monk, mage, and shaman, and my shaman has by far the most keybinds because of all the various totems.

Comment by Brainst0rm

on 2014/02/28 00:20:14

If they even touch Diplomacy, there will be blood.

It appears that Blizz is only overhauling the combat-related racials. Everything else is just flavor -- the point is to keep Mythic guilds from feeling like they need to transfer faction and change race to be competitive.

Comment by Worcester

on 2014/02/28 00:23:23

On a related note... will the item squish help reduce the rampant ganking? I'm definitely NOT talking about legitimate PvP, but rather the "pastime" of high level characters hanging out in low level zones, spamming whatever AOE they have and doing unstoppable carnage.

In the Vanilla and BC days, max level characters could (of course) kill players half their level with ease. However... if you got 3 or more 40's together... you could take down a 60 or even 70. Now, with stats and item levels taking off like a rocket-fueled runaway train, the state of world PvP is just a disaster. It's only appealing to kitten-drowning, serial killer interns. Let's face it... If the Boston Strangler is still around... you'll find him just outside the Dark Portal, standing over a pile of bones.

Comment by Worcester

on 2014/02/28 00:26:30

Talk about how racials are extremely powerfulMention Troll's berserking and even beast slayingSay nothing of the Human's free pvp trinket slot.Wat.

This would be considered OP if it wasn't on the same CD as every other movement freeing trinket in the game...

No, it's OP because with the Human racial, they don't NEED to carry a PvP trinket! It's built in. Every other race HAS to carry a PvP trinket, but Humans have it all the time. They can carry anything else they want in that slot.

Comment by wrongheaded

on 2014/02/28 00:31:56

Overall this list looks pretty good. But the time has come to make Every Man For Himself a baseline ability for all characters. No more PVP trinkets (and no more wishing you had yours equipped when you get ganked in your PVE set), no more Will of the Forsaken, no more balance issues. It was always dumb to give that racial to humans in the first place, they already had some damn good ones beforehand and we're not exactly hurting for people who roll as the 'default' race.

I love playing Forsaken (it's my favorite race by far) and I will really miss being able to pop WotF. But it's for the good of the game.

Comment by atomicwolf22

on 2014/02/28 00:56:32

Some of the racial changes look great. I know my Gnome Rogue/Priest are going to love the Gnome Racial Changes.

Primary Stat? Has this been defined yet? Does it mean like currently want we use in a class roles like strength/Agility for Dps, Intel. for Casters, Spirit for Healers, and Stam. for Tanks or is it going to be different with the primary stat removals that are coming to JC and possibly other professions?

Also with the Night Elf Racial is that many that the zones background might change depending on the time?

The stone form change for dwarfs looks very powerful for tank specs having a ability to dispel some debuffs on a timer could be a very powerful tank racial for progress tanks.

Also diplomacy is one of those racials that nice to have but it is very expendable in terms of them wanting to remove clutter for say. Looks like there trying to even out the different racials across the board for both Alliance and Horde.

But again this is very early in the proposed changes it doesn't mean that within the next month that these is going to stay the same.

Comment by ExperimentX4d2

on 2014/02/28 00:57:34

Very very interesting racial changes. I'd assume things like Heroic Presence would increase your primary stat to your spec, so a hunter would be +agility.What about Human Spirit though. +X of 2 Secondaries of your choice? So can we mix and match between them? Can I perhaps choose Mastery and Amp, and then change it to Haste and Readiness on demand?

Seen as secondaries don't change with spec, I'm interested to see how this plays out.

Also, Touch of Elune. Very interested to see how that operates. Will we be seeing high end raiders saying "Sorry I can only raid in the day so I get +crit"?

And a reason to play a non-mana gnome. Will the +5% stack with additions to rage/energy such as GoUR and… ugh… rogue stuff (i don't play rogue). Well… if it does with mana, I'd assume so.

Comment by Yerocida

on 2014/02/28 01:35:27

Cutting burst damage.. I'll just delete my shaman now then Blizz?

Comment by Ozirisa

on 2014/02/28 02:17:05

Nerfed critical hits - goodbye my Chaos Bolt

Comment by pathol

on 2014/02/28 03:15:18

Awesome changes. Especially in terms of reducing CC. Now it seems this game should be called "World of CC-craft", which really spoils the fun when you're being CC-ed for very long periods while having the only chance (e.g. resto shaman) to escape once every 2 minute ( using trinket). The solution could be either massively (compared to what we have now: 2 min CD?) reducing PvP trinket cooldown or nerfing most of CC spells. Good to hear Blizz is planning to get down to fix this. Also burst of some classes (esp. melee) is nowadays a pain in the neck while others have to hardcast a lot of their basic spells. Great news concerning reduction of damage in PvP as well. You're going in a good direction Blizz!

Comment by Angelsoul

on 2014/02/28 03:49:39

OH MY GOD, I LOVE YOU BLIZZ!Finally no more Horde raical help for them, no more 100% undead lock, troll hunter.Finally, a balance! I just wanted to see this horde cry for years! Yess, feeeeel sooooo goood!

Comment by afarrell

on 2014/02/28 04:28:08

Primary Stat? Has this been defined yet? Does it mean like currently want we use in a class roles like strength/Agility for Dps, Intel. for Casters, Spirit for Healers, and Stam. for Tanks.

Primary Stat will stay as it is: Str/Agi/Int. Spirit will be a secondary stat on a few pieces, Stam you'll get for free with ilvl.

Comment by Maelynn

on 2014/02/28 04:29:10

"I'm still pushing for Glyph of Bear Trap, which replaces Snake Trap's snakes with bears."

I'd laugh so hard if they implemented this with bear cubs.

Comment by Menardis

on 2014/02/28 04:39:43

There was no need to remove Disarms from the game entirely. They could have simply halved the duration of existing disarms; it is one of the unique mechanics of the game and could have avoided being the annoyance it is now with 8 seconds sometimes fully shutting down a certain class (DK, Hunter) but sometimes it was the only counter left open to you, i.e; Shadowpriests trying to peel a melee off.

If anything this will only exasperate problems with melee classes becoming un-kitable and un-peelable during WoD at various stages through the expansion, although if the Orc racial for 5% more pet damage gets the cut, then we might have less issues with Hunters stomping everything in the first season. I remain skeptical.

There are times in rated PvP when you are trying to deal with a Shield class or spec and burst them down. Disarms were sometimes one of the things that could make a window. It's a shame to see it just get removed entirely.